I Am Legend

Julie Christie has enhanced the filmscape with head-turning talent

Julie Christie once said that celebrity was like having chewing gum in your hair all the time. Asked if she still feels that way, she spins that vividly disgusting little simile into Grand Guignol. "You'd have to cut your hair off to get rid of it," she says. "No, you'd have to cut your head off." An enduring object of desire, she's like Audrey Hepburn in her elusive singularity: She's literally inimitable. There is no way to replicate her onscreen combination of lush sensuality, her acute intelligence, and the vulnerability that shimmers behind both. But for the past 30 years, Christie, now 66, has been the ultimate antistar, playing small parts for pleasure or to pay the bills, and only reluctantly agreeing to do something big. Before that, however, she spent a decade blazing like a supernova. And when she does take a leading role, as she did in Alan Rudolph's 1997 Afterglow and then again a mere 10 years later in Sarah Polley's Away From Her, she shines as brightly as ever. Christie earned an Oscar nomination for her Afterglow performance as a reclusive, insecure actress who gets involved with a younger married neighbor, and as ELLE went to press, she looked likely to get another—her fourth—for playing an elegant, ironically self-aware woman contending with Alzheimer's in Away From Her. "I think the reason she so rarely agrees to act is because her commitment is so intense," Polley says. "It must take a kind of energy that I can't even imagine. The world seems a lot bigger when you're around her. She's alive with a capital A."

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Other directors mention that intensity too. Both Rudolph and Kenneth Branagh, who persuaded her to tackle Gertrude in his 1996 Hamlet, say that Christie meant it when she told them she never notices the camera when she's acting. "It's not that she's in her own world," Rudolph says, "but rather the complete world in front of the lens. She can separate easily from her character before and after a take, but never, ever during." Branagh sees this as a kind of willed innocence and simplicity, a refusal to acquire too many technical tricks. "Actors talk about 'acting-schmacting,' " he says. "Acting becomes schmacting when the real thing disappears and you're over-the-top and putting on all sorts of flourishes. Julie Christie isn't capable of schmacting." The most shocking scene in Afterglow illustrates his point. Captured in a single take, Christie's character breaks her protective numbness and a decade's worth of repressed grief comes ripping out of her mouth. Clutching her husband (an astonishingly beautiful Nick Nolte), she squirms and howls and howls some more, until you think she'll never stop. It's transfixing and grotesque, as raw pain tends to be. "She erupted with such heartfelt anguish that while the camera was rolling, brilliant acting aside, I was concerned for her well-being," Rudolph says. "As soon as we cut, and it was a long take, she broke out laughing and said, 'That was silly, wasn't it?' Julie Christie indeed."

The first time I tried to watch Away From Her, I had to leave the screening room; I didn't feel like falling apart in front of my fellow critics. My mother died of Alzheimer's, and I've never seen anyone but Christie, not even the wonderful Judi Dench in 2001's Iris, capture the terrifying emptiness that flickers on and off in the eyes of someone in the early stages of the disease. When I ask her how she created the character of Fiona, giving her such uncannily accurate and nuanced life, her stomach-dropping absences as well as her presence, she can't tell me. Instead, she talks about people she has known with Alzheimer's, but her process, whatever it may be, isn't something that she can describe. This may be part of that willed innocence Branagh talked about, but it doesn't feel as if she's holding back. On the contrary, from the start of our London visit, she's remarkably forthcoming. We're meant to rendezvous at the self-serve café in Royal Festival Hall, where she's meeting up afterward with an old friend, the composer-musician Robert Wyatt. I'm still looking around for her slightly enigmatic, soigné screen persona when this cheerful, blond imp of a woman in a red sweater and matching ankle boots comes up, says, "Aha, I was looking for a woman on her own with a tape recorder," and kisses me on both cheeks. Having agreed to an interview—not her favorite thing—she's fully present, unpretentious, and interestingly frank. At one point we talk about Petulia, the powerfully prescient 1968 Richard Lester film about a rich man's battered wife, and she mentions an early boyfriend who hit her—just once—but she didn't leave him because she had cheated on him and felt guilty. "I understand now what I didn't then," she says, and we talk about how nobody did in those days. Later, with some amusement, she shows me the new Time Out London, with a cover story on Harold Pinter that quotes him saying, "Hollywood is a shit house that occasionally produces marvels." Interviewing Christie isn't like interviewing other stars. You find yourself discussing George Eliot's Middlemarch and Jack London's The Iron Heel, the rise of homelessness and public begging in London during the Thatcher era, the healing joys of country life and the ruthlessness of gentrification, and, oh, yes, her singular career.

In 1965, Christie was 24 and moving from television to film when events converged to send her career into orbit and keep it there. John Schlesinger's landmark movie Darling, about a vacuous, social climbing model who becomes an icon, made Christie the mini-skirted It Girl of swinging '60s Britain, an impudent, youthful place where talent trumped social class and young aristos did their best to get next to the Beatles and the Stones. By the time she collected an Oscar for Darling, David Lean's epic Doctor Zhivago, set in the turmoil of the Russian revolution, had opened, too, with Christie in the pivotal role of Lara. Playing the polar opposite of Darling's pop socialite, she evolves over the course of the more than three-hour picture from an awkward if sensual girl into a woman of great moral seriousness and incandescent beauty. Zhivago became one of the highest-grossing American films of all time and made Christie one of the world's most sought-after actresses. Over the next 10 years she made eight noteworthy films with directors to match, ranging from François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and Nicolas Roeg's psychological thriller Don't Look Now to Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Hal Ashby's riotous comedy Shampoo.

Opening in 1971, Altman's great revisionist Western was a turning point in Christie's life. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a witty, outrage-fueled portrait of the crushing of the American dream, with a pair of tragicomic lovers at its center. It stars Warren Beatty as an oddly endearing cardsharp with delusions of grandeur and Christie as a seen-it-all cockney madam setting up shop on the country's raw frontier; already a couple off-screen since 1967, neither of them had ever been better. "It's a very political film about the development of capitalism and the misuse of power," she says, adding that she didn't see that at the time. "But I knew I was on a strange film, something liberating and very modern." She describes how Altman, shooting in the hills above Vancouver, hired American war resisters as extras to build the town we see taking shape on-screen and in the process create permanent housing for themselves. For the next few years, Christie remained in Los Angeles with Beatty; she credits him with spurring her political awakening and America itself for showing her patriarchy in action and making her a feminist. They costarred again in the 1975 Shampoo, a scathingly funny portrait of '70s hedonism run wild in upscale L.A. She and Beatty would work together again three years later in Heaven Can Wait and continued to be friends. But in a move mirrored by the final scene of Shampoo, she returned to England after finishing that film, supposedly weary of his notorious womanizing.

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Christie turned her back on L.A.'s gilded excess to shape a working and personal life on her own terms. She has made 39 movies but has turned down leading roles in a number of big films, which, although she refuses to name them, are said to include They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Nicholas and Alexandra. Her indifference to career-building continues to mystify American journalists. She rolls her eyes at this, saying, "I'm reduced to saying things like 'I'm terribly lazy.' Actually, I'm hardworking all the time, just not always for money." Except for that intense early burst, her career has been only one part of her life. She has been politically active for more than 30 years, mostly behind the scenes, in the antinuclear and environmental movements, among others; currently, she raises funds for a British foundation that works with victims of torture. Her personal life is as self-determined as her professional one. Since the late '70s she has been with Duncan Campbell, a highly regarded journalist at London's left-leaning The Guardian newspaper. She says they spend as much time as possible at her small farm in Wales. But in the city, they have their own apartments, and hers is in an East End warehouse she converted into condos for friends long before that neighborhood became hip. "No communal kitchens!" she says, laughing. Polley recalls Christie's reaction to her love life when they became friends while making Hal Hartley's 2002 No Such Thing. "I was 21, about to move in with a boyfriend," Polley says. "She questioned why we needed to cohabit, and if we did, why couldn't we have adjoining apartments or houses like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera."

Christie's aversion to public exposure extends to awards. The Oscars reminds her of being shamed in front of her classmates by nuns and teachers in her private-school years for being too sexy. There's anger in her voice when she recalls this, and it's there when she describes a traumatic time in her childhood. Born in India and happy on her father's tea plantation, she was six when her mother abruptly packed her off to England to start her education and live with a foster mother. "She was a lovely, kind woman," Christie says, "and I totally bonded with her. And then eventually my mother separated from my father and I had to leave this mother." Such are the ways the British upper classes used to mangle their children, sometimes for life. But Christie drew a healthier lesson: Take charge, be kind to others, and always make sure to have a room of your own.

Before we part, I ask if the success of Away From Her has made her more willing to say yes if the right thing comes along. She hoots and says, "If the right thing comes along? That's like saying, 'If George Bush becomes a socialist.' " When you reach a certain age, she points out, "You're not going to get bundles of stories which feature an older person in some interesting situation." I'm not so sure. The baby boomers aren't getting any younger, and they're used to seeing themselves on-screen. Christie, whose beauty has only become more delicate with age, can show them what growing old gracefully means.